Personal blog

Firebase presentation & demo for #ohsiha

I’m taking Ohjelmallinen sisällönhallinta at school. It translates fairly well to programmatic content management. One of the goals of the course is to understand different content management systems and their architectures and how different information streams in the modern web (eg. public APIs for user-generated content) can be leveraged to build systems that are useful for the user and provide data in a meaningful way. Or something like that. Very web and very modern. At the moment (three weeks in and ~knowing what’s to come) I feel that I have already touched most of the course’s topics in my free time but I suppose you can never stop learning and the athmosphere is nice.

We have lectures and code clinics. In the code clinics the lecturer shows us different technologies and demoes all sorts of stuff. We are encouraged to participate and demo something ourselves. I decided to make a Firebase demo since I’ve been using Firebase for a couple of apps during the past two years.

The demo session/presentation went really well. I talked a bit about the modern shift of moving application logic to the client (JS running in the browser) and how that enables to make fully featured apps with a backend-as-a-service like Firebase (without the need for an actual server instance here or there). We built a simple application (or a static page if you will) that includes a list of messages and a form to submit messages. We connected the page with Firebase’s realtime database and deployed the page in Firebase’s free static site hosting. In the end everyone was able to open the page and submit messages that synced to everyone else’s web browsers in realtime.

It was really nice to make the demo and show how Firebase works to everyone. I think the other students liked it too and many people got some ideas for their project work (in which using Firebase is one of the options). I’m glad.

You may find the demo we built and a short description of Firebase here.